Data Stories from the First Data-Driven Salon Summit

Attendees compare notes during about their different personality types.

Attendees catch up while enjoying happy hour.

Attendees share data about their salons they learned during the Stack Up exercise.

Scott Buchanan gets ready to take a picture of the action on stage.

Attendees learn about the Smarter Lifestyle Network at their booth.

Robert Cromeans engages the audience.

An attendee writes down her goals after a session.

ZeeZor's Chris Nedza gives attendees a look at salon business through the data lens.

Modern Salon Media's Steve Reiss reiterates why data is so important in today's world and readies attendees for two days of learning.

Van Michael's Van Council shares how his team makes daily adjustments based on real-time data.

Monty Howard says, "Data eliminates The Feels."

"If you don't like numbers, I can pay you in smiley faces," Robert Cromeans tells his team if they complain about making their metrics transparent.

"Ninety percent of the population is right-handed, so guess where you should stock your retail?" says Allyson King.

Before looking at an additional location, Laura Ortmann says she wants to have 10-20% of the cash she'll need on hand and wants to maintain a 7% profit margin for two years, with 85% productivity, 75% existing client retention and a 60% prebooking rate.

World Class Financial's Jim Pacifico took attendees through the nuances of the salon P&L statement.

Bird Dog Capital's Jake LaJoie walked attendees through different succession scenarios and how to prep their businesses for each.

After conducting multiple intelligence tests on the audience, MI Cubed's Brent and Tim Golden showed each intelligence type how they are smart.

Brent Hardgrave was one of the few who passed both MI Cubed's audio and visual origami tests.

Write One Line's Scott Mawdesley demonstrates how to be a strong leader from the inside out.

Ginger Bay's Ryan Campbell is gifted with one of Mawdesley's leather-bound journals.

The Successful Stylists Panel, including Gary Harlan, Angel Ceasar, Moderator Clayton Nedza and Denise Deering detail their personal strategies for reaching such high service and retail sales.

Before looking at an additional location, Laura Ortmann says she wants to have 10-20% of the cash she'll need on hand and wants to maintain a 7% profit margin for two years, with 85% productivity, 75% existing client retention and a 60% prebooking rate.

Club Intrigue opened their doors for a special panel session after the Data-Driven event with Brent Hargrave, Amanda Hair, Nick Arrojo and Jeff South.

More than 200 salon owners and managers gathered in Atlanta in late June for the first-ever Data-Driven Salon Summit, hosted by Salon Today and ZeeZor. Through a number of top-notch presentations from successful salon owners and outside experts and a series of interactive panels of high-performing stylists and salon owner leaders, attendees learned how to mine their data to inspire their team to better their performance, identify opportunity and launch new profit centers, and make important decisions such as when to expand.

Modern Salon Media Publisher Steve Reiss welcomed attendees and walked them through how to use the Data-Driven workbooks to enhance their learning over the next two days. Salon Today’s Stacey Soble revealed salon success benchmarks by reviewing averages from the 2017 Salon Today 200. ZeeZor’s Chris Nedza told the story of how looking at his wife’s salons through his data lens led to the development of ZeeZor, a performance and communication App that lets each service provider see both their numbers and the numbers of their colleagues at the same time. And, Clayton Nedza walked attendees through StackUp, a tool that invited attendees enter in more than 12 salon performance metrics and showed them how they ‘stack up’ to other salons in the industry.

Audience Participation

Over the two days, interactive panel sessions added to the Data-Driven Experience. In the “Secrets of Successful Stylists,” Angel Castro Ceasar, a master stylists at Aria Salon in Forsyth, GA, revealed how she earned props for the highest percentage of service guests purchasing retail; Denise Deering, a master colorist at JUUT SalonSpa in Palo Alto, CA, showed how she brings in more than $500,000 a year in gross sales without an assistant; and Gary Harlan, owner and lead stylist at NColor+ Boutique2 in Naples, FL, demonstrated how he exceeds $700,00 in gross sales using assistants.

Ceasar, Deering and Harlan each walked attendees through their daily routine, offering suggestions for tightening schedules and recommending retail, then addressed a variety of questions from the audience.

During the “Salon Owner Success Stories,” The Refinery’s Marcus Allen, Atelier Salons’ Karie Bennett, Jamison Shaw’s Candy Shaw and JUUT SalonSpas’ David Wagner tackled a number of hot topics including developing a communication strategy across multiple locations, foraying into product development, buying a rental-based salon and transitioning it into a commission-based salon, and leveraging metrics to control growth.

An Alternative View

While successful salon owners made up the bulk of the aggressive Data-Driven agenda, experts from outside the industry lent their wisdom to the crowd.

Before the conference, MI Cubed’s Tim Golden invited attendees to take a 20-minute multiple intelligence’s personality test then he and Brent Golden invited them to sit at tables with attendees with similar intelligences, such as verbal/linguistics, math/logics, spatials, bodily kinesthetic, musicals, interpersonals and intrapersonals. They then walked the audience through how each of the intelligence types processes information.

“It’s not how smart you are, it’s how you are smart,” Tim Golden says.

Pastor Scott Mawdesley, founder of Write One Line helped attendees step up their leadership by drawing on information from their past, their present and their hopes for the future. “As important as it is for a company to have a clear mission statement, individuals need to have a personal mission statement,” Mawdesley said.

He encouraged attendees to ask themselves questions: “Ask yourself, ‘Are the choices you’re making today taking you towards or away from your dreams?’ When you’re working as part of a team, don’t ask yourself ‘Do I agree?’ but rather ‘Can I trust?’ And, when assessing current challenges, ask yourself, ‘What’s the one hard decision or hard conversation that I need to have that will allow me to have a breakthrough?’”

In addition, Jake LaJoie of Bird Dog Capital Group helped consider succession strategies by walking them through how to keep their salons in saleable shape.

“When thinking of selling, ask yourself, ‘Why?’” he says. “Is it for lifestyle, liquidity or legacy? The why helps determine the right buyer and the right sale structure.”

Learning by Doing

The bulk of the wisdom of the two-day Data-Driven Salon summit was delivered by the successful owners who generously shared their best practices. Following are stories from Van Michael's Van Council, Salon Visage's Monty Howard, Robert Cromeans, Hair & Co. BKLYN's Allyson King; Ginger Bay Salons and Spas' Laura Ortmann; World Class Salons' Jim Pacifico; Gene Juarez Salons and Spas' Scott Missad and Gadabout SalonsSpas' Jana and Frank Westerbeke. Click on their individual links below to access each story of how they use data every day to continuously grow their salon businesses:

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